https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Yrdcn9wobXU
Hello and welcome to Navigating Patterns. What I’d like to talk about today is this idea that you have free choice. And free is the keyword here. And choice, we think we understand. But I want to weave these two together and explain to you why we may have choice, we may have freedom, but we don’t have free choice. So again, these are my definitions. You can adopt them, you can throw them out, or you can modify them to suit your own needs. So what am I talking about when I go into this idea of free choice? There’s these concepts around free will and agency, which we’ll be talking about at some point. But free choice is a little bit different the way I define it. So free choice is a choice where you’re not making a compromise. You’re not having to trade. You’re not incurring any cost. And I think that’s impossible, literally impossible. I think most of the things in the reality that we sense are deeply connected, right? There are these deep patterns and connections between all of the stuff, whether it be material stuff or ethereal stuff sort of in space. And maybe it’s useful to unpack that. So material stuff is easy. You know what material is. It’s the stuff that’s made out of atoms and molecules and sticks together and has or doesn’t. Magnetism is affected by gravity, those things. The ethereal things, a lot of people refer to this as spirit. Many things are ephemeral. But there’s a great example by John Vervaike, where he points out that E equals MC squared is real. It does seem to be real, but it’s not material. You can’t tell me where it is. You can’t grab it. You can’t break it into parts and reorder it and expect it to be meaningful. It might be, but it also might not be. So, and even in that example, there are things you can move around about that equation, but they’re not free. When you move things around in an equation, you change the nature of the equation, and you may change the nature of what’s going on. And some of those natures, because it’s an equation and it’s really a model in some sense, some of those natures work and some don’t, right? And a lot of times things work for a while and then they don’t. So to get back to this idea of free choice and why it doesn’t really exist, whenever we make a choice and make a change in the world, a bunch of other things change. Now, we may not see them or they may not affect us, so we may not care. But that doesn’t mean it was free. It may be free to us, true, but maybe not. Maybe that cost comes back in some other way. This is where we get into the concept of karma, right? You got what was coming to you, things like that. Sometimes we make a choice now for something in the future, and I really like the way that, say, Jordan Peterson talks about this, right? He talks about this Simpsons episode where Homer has vodka and mayonnaise. And he says, well, I don’t have to worry about this. This is a problem for future Homer. And then downs it and says, boy, I’d hate to be that guy. Or I’m glad I’m not that guy. So you’re making a choice. You’re choosing fun in the moment for a hangover in the future. And we’re always making those choices. And they’re inevitable. Like, choices are inevitable. We’re always making choices. Even when you choose not to decide, right, you’re still going to end up having made a choice because entropy exists. So we change through time. The world changes through time, whether we like it or not. So this is an important issue. We are not making free choices. We may have the freedom to make a choice. But we have to take the responsibility for whatever happens due to that choice. And some of these choices can have very long term effects. And so, you know, we think we’re doing something for a little while and it’s no big deal. And then years later, maybe decades later, it comes back to haunt us. And if you take Jordan Peterson seriously, he says, nobody ever gets away with anything. I’m not sure that that’s true. That’s his observation. I don’t want to deny his observation. He has a lot more experience with that than I do, certainly. But it could be true, right? It could be that, you know, all of your choices matter so much that you can’t imagine it. And maybe you wouldn’t make those choices if you knew what all the implications were, what all the web of connectedness would lead to down the road, whether it be in the future or whether it be with groups of people you don’t know. A lot of times we harm people, we don’t even realize it. A lot of times people get angry with us over things that we don’t understand. And that’s because we’re not taking responsibility for understanding that we don’t have free choice. All of our choices have costs somewhere, maybe in the future, maybe in the present to other groups, maybe in the present to ourselves, and we’re just not seeing it. A lot of the things when people are talking about things like self-fulfilling prophecy, right? What they’re really saying to me is you made a choice you thought was free, but it wasn’t free. And you keep thinking it’s free, and you keep running into the same problem of the cost. You keep paying that cost over and over again, because you’re not recognizing the relationship between the thing you did and the cost you paid for it. And then you’re stuck, you’re stuck in this cycle, right, in this self-fulfilling prophecy. So that’s very much linked in my mind to free choice. And the way out of this is to understand that there are these connections and maybe seek out other perspectives on the matter. So that you can get a sense for whether or not your ideas are good or bad. Because we all outsource our sanity in some way. And understanding our decisions with others through distributed cognition helps us to get a grasp on whether or not our decisions are going to have consequences. What those consequences might be, and how bad they could be. And maybe if you’re not willing to take the worst possible consequence of an action, you shouldn’t take the action. I don’t know that that’s true, but it might be true. It’s certainly worth considering. And again, with all of these videos, I hope you’ll consider them. You’ll really think about them. Some of them may have, well, we’ll call them overly simplistic sounding ideas, right? But maybe they’re not simplistic ideas. Maybe these ideas are very deep and they’re just being presented in a simplistic way, hopefully not overly simplistic. But in really turning them around in our minds and playing with them and applying some critical thinking, which is having more than one perspective. Questioning, being skeptical about our own thoughts. Maybe that’ll give us some depth to the idea of free choice and how that’s wrapped up in responsibility and in knowing. And in a deeper understanding of things so that you don’t run yourself into trouble. Because thinking you have a free choice can be a very dangerous way to live. And it can seem a lot to you like your choices should be free and you’ll become resentful when they’re not. Or you’ll make a choice, you won’t attach the choice that you made to the consequence of that choice. And you’ll feel like there are forces beyond your control ruling your life. And sometimes there are forces beyond your control ruling your life. But not all the time and often not to the extent that we like to think. There’s often a difference between getting what we want and getting what we want the way we want to get it. And often if we drop trying to get it the way we want to get it, we can get exactly what we want. And that’s a minor detail, but it’s a really significant detail. It turns out to play a big role. Oftentimes when we approach a problem differently, we can have exactly what we want with a set of choices that don’t cost us as much as other choices might. And maybe those choices that we make actually strengthen us. Because sometimes we need to be jostled around or rattled or struggle through our decisions. And struggling in a good way is a thing that we can choose to do. So that’s also wrapped up in this idea of free choice. Because often you’re choosing between different types of suffering or different types of struggle. And that can be very important to your character development. I hope that this concept of free choice and why I think it doesn’t exist is helpful to you. And I’m very glad that people are engaging with my videos and taking this stuff seriously, hopefully as seriously as they need to, to help themselves out. And I’m really grateful that you took your time and attention and put it towards my videos. Thank you.